Hi all! Some questions...

[Chuck Lutz]

Hi folks,

My name is Chuck Lutz, and I've been a lurker on this list for a
long time.  Unfortunately I don't get to read the posts too much,
but I've been generally interested in emusic instrument design/build-
ing since I was a teenager.

I finished my BSEE in '94 and as fate would have it ended up working
in a different field than instrument design, but I'm interested in
trying to be a "basement hacker" at this stuff.

Some questions for you; if anyone has some tips, I'd sure appreciate
it!

1) While I was in school, I concentrated in DSP/software stuff for
the last year or two.  While I had the usual h/w lab courses, my hands
on electronics training is pretty shabby, I think.  Thus, I forget
almost everything, embarassingly enough.  To get back into it, I would 
like to try to get together some sort of lab setup for experimenting
with synth-diy sorta stuff.  Unfortunately, I can't spend thousands on
a nice scope, etc.  Would anyone have some recommendations on putting
together a basic setup tailored to this sort of work?  Scopes, power
supplies, meters, etc.?

2) I'm starting to think about various MIDI hardware applications; I
have some ideas about MIDI gadgets I'd like to build for myself. 
I have the MIDI spec, but it doesn't say too much about the hardware
besides the actual "signal interface" aspects.  I've never fooled
with UARTs and unfortunately I forget sooooo much from the one digital
lab I had involving microprocessors.  8P
My rough plan at the moment is to develop some MIDI gadget software
in a CASE tool and get C code from it, which I would then run on
either some sort of microcontroller or a more beefy chip depending
on the complexity of the application.  What I'd like some advice on
is how to handle the acquisition and decoding of the MIDI bit stream...
I started to fool with designing the task of grabbing bit by bit from
the stream, checking for start/stop bits, etc., right in the s/w, but
I get the impression that a UART can be set up to do this for me, and
then I get a ready-to-go byte-by-byte stream right from the UART.
The UART is then somehow integrated with my microcontroller, micro-
processor, or whatever, which is running the application software.
I have Hal Chamberlin's classic text, and it seems to give one example,
but I was wondering if anyone has fooled with general (not "General")
MIDI apps on any UART/processor combinations more modern than the 68K.
I ask this since I'm worried about speed.  Unless, of course the 68K
is beefy enough to handle anything MIDI wise.  Perhaps someone has 
some metrics on the subject?  I'm always reading about the sluggish
MIDI response of this-or-that instrument in _Keyboard_ mag reviews;
I wonder what causes the problem and why so many makers seem not to
get around it.

Well, I hope this isn't too long of a first post!  Reply publicly if
you think it would benefit all, otherwise, feel free to just drop me
a public line if my requests are common knowledge to list veterans.

Thanks a lot!

Chuck Lutz

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